With blockchain technology showing up in everything from global shipping to cloud storage and real estate transactions, it's no surprise that it's now seen as a way to help companies trade and sell carbon credits.

Veridium has developed a way to effectively tokenize carbon credits, allowing them to be bought, sold and transferred – much like any other commodity. That goal is to create a public, permissioned blockchain that lets companies trade carbon offsets in real-time.

The IBM-Viridium effort is aimed at companies; a similar effort is under way by ice cream chain Ben & Jerry's, according to Forbes. That particular project envisions carbon credits as microtransactions that can be associated with ice cream sales – with a portion of the money from sales being used for efforts to slow climate change.

The underlying technology for the Ben & Jerry's project, like the one involving Viridium Labs, would use the Stellar blockchain protocol. (Stellar is a blockchain protocol IBM has worked with since last October.)

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